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Playwright Geetha Reddy dips a toe back into theater and gets ‘washed down the river’

Lily JaniakApril 18, 2019Updated: April 25, 2019, 9:10 am

Playwright Geetha Reddy’s “Far, Far Better Things,” inspired by “A Tale of Two Cities,” will premiere at Live Oak Theater in Berkeley. Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

“I don’t want to give you the impression that I was the nice Indian kid,” says Geetha Reddy. “I wasn’t that kid.”

The playwright’s mode of speaking backs her up. Reddy, 48, speaks in a low, mischievous voice, as if she’s conspiring with you, hastening to get her words out so some subterfuge — one you should already know about, and better hurry to grasp if you don’t — can unfold.

Still, by 2001, the Pittsburgh native and first-generation American had achieved the kind of milestones of which many parents, of any background, would be proud. An outsider might never have guessed that she’d go on to write “Far, Far Better Things,” which juxtaposes the lives of a South Asian doctor and her Latina nanny and housekeeper, loosely inspired by “A Tale of Two Cities.” The world premiere opens Sunday, April 28, at Live Oak Theater in a co-production by TheatreFirst and Shotgun Players.

Astronomy degree from Wesleyan in hand, Reddy had moved to the Bay Area and built “a nice career in tech,” founding with her husband a consulting business called Helium. She’d married and had a child relatively young. “And when I say ‘relatively’ — relative to American standards, not Indian standards.”

Her whole life, she’d had an interest in theater and filmmaking. She dabbled in both while in school. “But I just didn’t feel like I could do it” as a focus of study or a career, she says. “I didn’t feel like it was in the realm of possibility for me.”

Geetha Reddy updates her script during a cast rehearsal for “Far, Far Better Things.” Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

Then, that year, “when I was pregnant with my second son, there were all these doomsday predictions about that pregnancy.” The doctors couldn’t find a heartbeat. “I started being very introspective. I thought, ‘Let’s just take stock. What do I actually I want? Where am I?’ ”

Her son ended up being fine, but the soul searching led her back to her old love of the arts. “Suddenly that part of my life had fallen away,” she says. “I just wasn’t recognizing myself.” She signed up for a playwriting class with John Fisher, artistic director of Theatre Rhinoceros and two-time Glickman Award winner. “He’s so hilarious and cranky as a teacher — just the best.”

Her classmates were creating one-off pop-up theater events and entering PlayGround, the long-running new-work developer best known for its Monday Night PlayGround series, which presents 10-minute plays responding to a prompt its writers’ pool learns just days in advance. “I was, like, that’s perfect. I’m deadline-driven. It’s 10 minutes. My husband can give me a cone of silence during the weekend. I can knock out 10 pages of anything!”

Geetha Reddy, who has a degree in astronomy, also had a career in tech before dabbling in theater and being swept away. Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

She got into the pool and loved how meritocratic the process felt. “At the end of a PlayGround Monday Night, everybody kind of knows which plays were working and which weren’t — and to have that be, like, it’s just because of the work, and it’s not favoritism or race or gender.” PlayGround gave her her first commission. “I was dipping my toe into it and kind of got washed down the river.”

Her work has now been produced by Playwrights’ Foundation, San Francisco Playhouse, Central Works and Crowded Fire’s Matchbox Series. She also wrote a short film, “Obit,” which appeared at LA Shorts and NY Indie Fest, among others.

In November, Reddy will also premiere a one-person adaptation of “The Mahabharata” with Ubuntu Theater Project, starring the transgender actor J Jha. “The idea is to take back the storytelling of it. Even though it was written down, it was an oral tradition.” Jha was born in India, and there’s “the urgency they bring with them, the pleasure” in how they tell stories. “It’s kind of like, ‘Let me tell you, Geetha!’ — where they use your name.” This version will center not on the epic’s well-known heroic warriors, but on more unsung characters.

“Far, Far Better Things” started out years ago, from a love of Dickens combined with a frustration with his “inert” female characters in “A Tale of Two Cities.” (One of the characters in her play, a young high school student studying the novel, voices that very criticism.) “There’s Lucie Manette, who’s this angelic good wife, very passive, always defends her husband. Then there’s Madame Defarge, the woman who’s plotting.”

Geetha Reddy (left) teaches cast member Michelle Navarrete how to crochet during rehearsal for “Far, Far Better Things.” Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

After the 2016 election, she had to rethink her concept, deciding, “I’m not going to write a play about an evil, knitting revolutionary. I just can’t do it. What I always wanted was to think about, why aren’t these two women friends?” Her answer centered on the pair’s socioeconomic differences. “Lucie is the boss’ daughter, and Madame Defarge is married to someone who worked for the boss.”

The contemporary analogy she found — a South Asian doctor, Zoe (Kimiya Shokri), and her Latina nanny and housekeeper, Pilar (Michelle Navarrete) — is “close to home.”

Actors Yohana Ansari-Thomas (left) and Neiry Rojo read though part of the “Far, Far Better Things” script with director Katja Rivera at Shotgun Players’ rehearsal studios. Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

“Having a person who watches your kids is a very awkward balance, particularly when it’s not just a babysitter, when it’s a full-time job for them.” She mentions a recent time the school bus broke down, and she had to pick her son up, and a bunch of other neighborhood kids piled in.

“We all think that we live in this capitalist society. But really there are other currencies, and one of the currencies people don’t pay attention to is the favor currency, and that tends to exist in what are traditionally called women’s domains. In the favor currency, when you pay someone a favor, your status increases. … So much of what the play’s about is the discomfort that women and people have, I think in general, about when things that normally would have been in the favor domain, like watching somebody’s child, are in the capitalist domain.”